Slashdot Mirror
2007's Ten Biggest Gaming Letdowns
Game|Life offers up an anti-top-ten list, noting the three blog authors' biggest disappointments from 2007. Chris Kohler's biggest letdown echoes my own feelings on this topic: "No LittleBigPlanet. PlayStation 3's software library got significantly better this holiday, but there's no killer app. I honestly don't know if LittleBigPlanet would have been one. But I think it's going to be mine. It's going to be the thing that glues me to PlayStation 3... when it ships. I was all ready to start building worlds and sharing them with my friends and generally start being a jackass by now, but it won't happen until next year -- late next year, if you believe the rumors. I hope they're not true. And I do hope LittleBigPlanet sets the planet on fire when it releases." Any gaming 'event' this year an epic fail for you?
1) Smash Bros Brawl being delayed until next year. Mr. Iwata personally told me that he was hoping to make this game a release title for the "Revolution" (this was in 2005). We're now more than a year overdue, and for something like Smash that really doesn't imply 6.5 solid years of development time. They were simply slow to start on it.
The problem with SSB Brawl is Iwata made a promise he couldn't possibly deliver. Iwata publicly announced a SSB game as a Wii launch title in late '05, THEN went to the designer of the previous games in the series and asked him to make the game. The guy had left Nintendo a few years prior. So, Nintendo had 1 year to get the guy to agree to make the game, get a dev team for him to work with, and create the game. Once this became public knowledge, it was pretty clear it wasn't going to be a launch game. In the end, it took them a little over two years to put it together, assuming no further delays.
And you apparently haven't read Slashdot since Halo 3 was announced...nearly the exact same cut and paste troll post has been posted in nearly every single story dealing with video games. Changing the first sentence so that it seems to be on-topic with the discussion doesn't make it any less of a shill/troll post.
And no, I won't block AC posts because sometimes ACs do in fact make insightful comments...when they aren't pasting in responses that were written months ago, that is.
Living With a Nerd
Nice strawman, though.
First, what study have you read indicating that Xboxs released in the past year still suffer the same number of hardware malfunctions as their predecessors? I play close attention to gaming news and I haven't seen a study like this anywhere. Please tell me where you get this information so that I can be as informed as you are.
Second, Bioware was bought out. It's not as though they "left". If fact, Bioware was never an exclusive developer, they simply made a few exclusive games, which I'm sure many developers have done at one time or another for one console or another. It's entirely possible that future games developed by Bioware could also be Xbox exclusive. Also, Bungie may be wholly independent now, but they've stated they have no intention of developing for other consoles. Your statements that developers "are in shambles" and have "turned their backs" on Microsoft seem to be considerably exaggerated. Let's not forget that 3rd party exclusiveness isn't exactly Nintendo's or Sony's strong points.
Third... graphical disasters? Really? Let's check some review quotes for Mass Effect, shall we.
Basically, I find it hard to believe that anyone could really claim that they were "graphical disasters". Even if you had said they were "graphically subpar", I would probably take issue. But "graphical disaster" makes it sound as though you have some kind of vendetta against these games? I'd call you a Nintendo or a Sony fanboy, but I'm not that petty (wait, maybe I just did).